Contributors

Monday, November 30, 2009

From the Times of India – a “put up or shut up” moment – “we’ll go along if you pay us”.

BEIJING: In an unprecedented move, India on Saturday joined China and two other developing countries to prepare for a major offensive on rich nations at the Copenhagen conference on climate change next month.

The four countries, which include Brazil and South Africa, agreed to a strategy that involves jointly walking out of the conference if the developed nations try to force their own terms on the developing world, Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister for environment and forests (independent charge), said.

If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:

Aarrggghhh! That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ...”

Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry’s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders’ legal requests to see their data.

While Harry is puzzling over temperatures — “I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation” — the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: “Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century — in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph — the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium — was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for details.)

In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.

Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.

It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts like Harry. How exactly were the readings converted into what the English scientists describe as “quality controlled and homogenised” data?

Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too.

In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. Skeptical bloggers are already dissecting Harry’s work. As they relentlessly pore over other data, the British scientists will feel Harry’s pain:

Sure, it would be great if John had health care insurance. But at what cost to everybody else? Should women under 50 be denied mammograms so as to hold down health costs so that John can have government-subsidized insurance? How about men over 70 with slow acting prostate cancer? Should we deny them treatment on the assumption that something else will kill them first, so that the government can afford to insure John?

The point is that Kristof and his ilk are basically running a con. They want you to focus on the most sympathetic cases, while ignoring the large and amorphous mass of individuals who will be adversely affected.

But in fact I doubt anyone will really win, least of all the Liberals.

The candidates:

1. Turnbull, who wants to back a great green tax right now - a decision that many Liberal MPs and even more Liberal members know is disastrous for Australia and against all reason. Other problem: Turnbull is unelectable, and a man few in the Liberal partyroom now believe is fit to lead.

2. Tony Abbott, who has just announced that he must stand as a candidate, since the reason he opposed Turnbull was that his leader refused to delay Senate approval of Rudd’s great green tax - and now Abbott’s hearing that Hockey as leader may allow a conscience vote that would still get it through. Abbott’s policy is the only one that the Liberals could fight with at an election, if it were argued with conviction. Problem: Abbott has only held his new view for a week or two, and is unelectable, besides.

3. Joe Hockey, who has not even said for sure he’ll run, and has no idea what to do about Rudd great green tax - which he so foolishly supported, and now can’t credibly oppose. I mean, a conscience vote? That would simply leave the Liberals with all the odium of being a party riven by “deniers”, without any of the kudos from arguing that position with pride and passion. If Hockey had the wit, energy and daring he could use Climategate as perhaps the reason to explain a change of mind, but who’d expect something so bold and demanding from him? And I fear already that Hockey is about as unelectable as was Kim Beazley, if not more so.

At least the Liberals have a choice, I guess, between yes to the tax, no to the tax, and a don’t know.

Who, underneath this canopy, will be the Liberals’ next leader - after Hockey, I presume? And could they be found in time for tomorrow?

Do we still have the will to win in Afghanistan? If so, the question the Iraq inquiry should be asking is not “how did we get into this war” - we have had a number of separate inquiries into that already – but “why were the military defeated on the ground in Basra?”. If the Chilcot Inquiry were to focus on that, it might actually serve a purpose: not just in unearthing new information (which it has signally failed to do so far) but drawing lessons that just might help the troops in Afghanistan. I make this point in my News of the World column today.

I am in a tiny minority of people who a) supported the war in Iraq, and b) still admits it. People like me feel every bit as angry as the anti-war people about what happened next. I suspect the following happened in Iraq and I do hope the inquiry gets to the bottom of it.

And Kevin Rudd’s plan to cut greenhouse gases would account for 50 per cent of the increase, according to a secret report with the State Government.

In alarming news for struggling families, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal is recommending the hefty rise in power bills from next July… IPART is disputing Canberra’s forecast that an Emissions Trading Scheme will only add 7 per cent to electricity prices in 2011/12, rising to 12 per cent the following year. IPART expects the impact of the CPRS will be closer to 30 per cent by mid-2013.

Remember that this is just a downpayment on the true cost of this mad tax. You won’t just pay higher power prices. You will also pay more for everything that needed electricity, too - processed foods, clothes, cars, steel, concrete, train rides… You’ll need to pay more for the people who will lose their jobs because of this tax. You’ll pay more for the uneconomic “green” power we’ll be forced to use instead of cheap coal-fired power. You’ll pay for the gassy companies demanding compensation for going broke. You’ll pay for the billions Kevin Rudd is spending overseas to bribe pooer countries to cut gases, too.

You’ll pay. I suspect you’ll one day make Labor pay, too. And make the Liberals pay who said this great green tax on everything was a good idea - because they did not dare say no.

Bought this on the recommendation of the guy at De Vines in Inglewood today.

It's an independent liquor store and can choose what it likes to stock.

They tend to follow winemakers and particular producers they like more than show results.

Have spoken to this guy there a few times now and he really is very enthusiastic about Geoff Hardy.

Now, I have drunk very little Pinot Noir and have liked significantly less.

It wasn't until I was at Wignalls just outside of Albany that I think I finally began to understand what people were going on about.

The problem of course is that whereas you can still get a wine made from Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon that punches above its weight for below $30, it seems almost impossible for Pinot Noir.

Paying $30 as I did for this wine appears to be the minimum required if you want something that is going to provide more than just quaffing.

And I'd say I'm pretty happy with the recommendation.

As is typical of the variety, the colour of the wine as it is poured into the glass is always a worry to me.

I like something that is as dark and impenetrable as possible. While the colour is fresh, it is also clear. I can't help thinking "thin" would be a word to describe it.

But I've got to put that Bordeaux and Rhonish prejudice aside.

This is different.

I don't have the language to describe the smell and the taste adequately. I suppose I might be picking up things described as forest floor and whatever, but then again, I'm not sure what a forest floor smells like.

But there is a smell and a taste that I have come to like quite a lot with this wine and, while of course not having the body of a Cabernet or a Shiraz wine, it isn't gutless or weak though, (the besetting sin of so many Pinot Noirs).

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

No sane Government can now commit themselves to spending their national wealth on science so shady.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

The report below appeared in "The Times" of London, which means that the news concerned has now gone mainstream and has become general public knowledge. And it is again an objective article from the keyboard of Leaky Jonathan! Quite a change! He can obviously tell which way the wind is blowing

The storm began with just four cryptic words. "A miracle has happened," announced a contributor to Climate Audit, a website devoted to criticising the science of climate change. "RC" said nothing more - but included a web link that took anyone who clicked on it to another site, Real Climate. There, on the morning of November 17, they found a treasure trove: a thousand or so emails sent or received by Professor Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Jones is a key player in the science of climate change. His department's databases on global temperature changes and its measurements have been crucial in building the case for global warming.

What those emails suggested, however, was that Jones and some colleagues may have become so convinced of their case that they crossed the line from objective research into active campaigning. In one, Jones boasted of using statistical "tricks" to obliterate apparent declines in global temperature. In another he advocated deleting data rather than handing them to climate sceptics. And in a third he proposed organised boycotts of journals that had the temerity to publish papers that undermined the message.

It was a powerful and controversial mix - far too powerful for some. Real Climate is a website designed for scientists who share Jones's belief in man-made climate change. Within hours the file had been stripped from the site. Several hours later, however, it reappeared - this time on an obscure Russian server.

British warming crusader George Monbiot has written two recent columns on denialism.

The first, three weeks ago, castigated the alleged denialism of sceptics:

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

The second, just three days ago, castigated the alleged denialism of Monbiot’s fellow warmists:

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

So which of those two columns do you think the Sydney Morning Herald chose to run today - the dated one attacking sceptics (again) or the new one attacking the warmists now refusing to confront the greatest scientific scandal of their faith?

This is not just denial but deceit. Monbiot is made to seem as if he’s reacting to the revolt of the Liberal sceptics against their warmist leader, when in fact that revolt was driven in (small) part by the very scandal that he accepts is genuine.

UPDATE

The mainstream media - with a handful of (conservative) exceptions - do not know what terrible damage they are doing to their credibility by ignoring or drastically downplaying the Climategate scandal. The story is out, a couple of million times over, on the Internet.

What do you think the people reading of this scandal there conclude when they then turn to, say, The Age or the ABC, and find there barely a word of coverage?

I’ll tell you: they’ll conclude that the media cannot be trusted to tell even the news, let alone the truth, when it conflicts with their agenda. Hear that from the ABC’s Melbourne talkback host Jon Faine himself when he explained why he would not even discuss the emails:

The other thing these readers will conclude is that for news involving certain ideologies, they must of necessity turn to the Internet, and in particular to certain blogs they trust to speak freely. For all those in the ABC and Age who deplore the influence of my blog, my sincere thanks for your part this week in making it more essential reading than ever.

Fools. You cut your own throats.

(A PS for media monitoring services and self-Googlers who most need to read and reflect on the above: attention Mark Scott, Paul Ramadge, Angelo Frangopoulos, Jeremy Millar and David Koch.)

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

Friday, November 27, 2009

Great minds shape the thinking of successive historical periods. Luther and Calvin inspired the Reformation; Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire and Rousseau, the Enlightenment. Modern thought is most dependent on the influence of Charles Darwin

Editor's Note: This story, originally published in the July 2000 issue of Scientific American, is being made available due to the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species

Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21st century, drastically different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists as to the source of this revolutionary change. Karl Marx is often mentioned; Sigmund Freud has been in and out of favor; Albert Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that Einstein’s theories “have profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the phenomena of inanimate nature.” No sooner had Pais said this, though, than he recognized the exaggeration. “It would actually be better to say ‘modern scientists’ than ‘modern men and women,’” he wrote, because one needs schooling in the physicist’s style of thought and mathematical techniques to appreciate Einstein’s contributions in their fullness. Indeed, this limitation is true for all the extraordinary theories of modern physics, which have had little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world.

The situation differs dramatically with regard to concepts in biology. Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more—and for more drastic—modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s accomplishments were so many and so diverse that it is useful to distinguish three fields to which he made major contributions: evolutionary biology; the philosophy of science; and the modern zeitgeist. Although I will be focusing on this last domain, for the sake of completeness I will put forth a short overview of his contributions—particularly as they inform his later ideas—to the first two areas.

After all, why in all of evolution would nature have designed a body part with such obviously enormous reproductive importance to hang off the body so defenseless and vulnerable? Although we tend to become accustomed to our body parts and it often fails to occur to us to even ask why they are the way they are, some of the biggest evolutionary mysteries are also the most mundane aspects of our lives.

Thus, the first big question is why so many mammalian species evolved hanging scrotal testicles to begin with.

Dr. Curry gets props from the skeptical community because she had the courage to invite Steve McIntyre to give a presentation at Georgia Tech, for which she took criticism. Her letter is insightful and addresses troubling issues. We can all learn something from it. – Anthony

An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research – By Dr. Judith A. Curry, Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Based upon feedback that I’ve received from graduate students at Georgia Tech, I suspect that you are confused, troubled, or worried by what you have been reading about ClimateGate and the contents of the hacked CRU emails. After spending considerable time reading the hacked emails and other posts in the blogosphere, I wrote an essay that calls for greater transparency in climate data and other methods used in climate research. The essay is posted over at climateaudit.org (you can read it at http://camirror.wordpress.com/ 2009/ 11/ 22/ curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/ ).

What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.

For nearly 20 years, the critically endangered Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis) has been considered nearly extinct in the wild, victimized by habitat loss and poaching. A small population was found in Cambodia in 2000 and, until now, it was believed that, at most, 250 of the rare crocodiles existed in the world.

But recently, conservationists became aware of a new population of Siamese crocodiles, all of which were already living in captivity at Cambodia's Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center. According to researchers from Fauna & Flora International (FFI), this means there is hope of creating a captive-breeding program to save the Siamese crocodile from extinction.

The newly discovered crocs were originally suspected to be hybrids of multiple crocodile species. But conservationists managed to wrestle all 69 crocs living at the center (not an enviable job) to obtain DNA samples. Testing proved that 35 of the 69 animals were purebred Siamese, including six adults and 29 juveniles and hatchlings.

"This could provide a critical lifeline for the long-term preservation of this critically endangered species," Phnom Tamao Director Nhek Ratanapech said in a prepared statement.

"For the first time in Cambodia, we have a captive population of animals that we know 100 percent are purebred Siamese crocodiles," Adam Starr, who manages the Cambodian Crocodile Conservation Program, told the Associated Press. The program is a joint effort of the Cambodian government and FFI.

FFI and other conservation groups will now help the staff at Phnom Tamao to come up with a breeding program that could yield new crocodiles as early as next year. If successful, they will also work with the IUCN Reintroduction Specialist Group to release Siamese crocodiles back into the wild once the offspring have reached two years of age.

Siamese crocodiles were hunted into near-extinction in the mid–20th century due to their highly prized skin, which is much softer than that of other crocodile species. Researchers knew that some hybrid crocs on Cambodian farms had Siamese DNA because they had long ago been crossbred with other crocodile species to produce larger, faster-growing, softer-skinned animals for commercial exploitation. This is the first time that purebred Siamese crocodiles have been found among any hybrids anywhere in Cambodia.

(Hockey Team is what the dishonest shysters behind the now infamous Hockey Stick climate graph and the recent CRU email and data scandal call themselves.)

A French scientist’s temperature data show results different from the official climate science. Why was he stonewalled? Climate Research Unit emails detail efforts to deny access to global temperature data

A disc the size of a fingernail that destroys the most dangerous form of skin cancer has been developed by scientists. Fitted under the skin, the tiny device wiped out melanoma in up to half of the cases it was tested on. It paves the way for a treatment with improved prognosis and fewer side-effects than traditional anti-cancer drugs. The disc, which measures 8.5mm across, uses proteins usually found on skin tumours as 'bait' to trigger a powerful immune response.

The process begins with the disc, which is porous and loaded with a cocktail of compounds, being implanted under the skin. It releases proteins that lure immune-system messengers inside the disc. There, they spot the tumour proteins planted as bait and kickstart a chain of reactions which culminate in specialised white blood cells hunting down and destroying the tumour itself. The cells are programmed to attack only the tumour, sparing healthy cells from damage, and the body from side effects such as hair loss and nausea.

The manipulation of the immune system means the disc is classed as a vaccine, even though it would be used to treat cancer, rather than prevent it.

When mice with large melanomas were treated, tumours were eliminated in up to half of cases. In contrast, untreated animals rapidly succumbed, the journal Science Translational Medicine reports.

The work, at Harvard University in the U.S., is at an early stage but suggests a similar device could be used to combat skin cancer in people. The scientists believe their technique is simpler than vaccine treatments under development. Researcher Professor David Mooney said: 'We've taken a major step toward the design of effective cancer vaccines.'

This is a surprise. Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia suggests that the “I.P.C.C. has run its course”. I agree with him. We really need to remove a wholly political organization, the United Nations, from science.

[Upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen] “is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. [...] It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science. It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

Full Hulme Statement:

The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the I.P.C.C. does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.

This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON CLIMATEGATE: “This interview with the head of the UN’s climate experts is ridiculous. He responds to concerns about the peer review process being stacked by saying . . . all the work was peer reviewed. I am open to being convinced that I should not care about hacked information, and I am a confirmed believer in AGW. So why can’t, or won’t, the climate change community mount a more compelling defense?”

Plus this: ClimateGate: The end of credibility and the need for process control. “Increasingly, the average concerned citizen without a particular ax to grind will no longer trust the climate scientists simply because they say so, or because Al Gore says so on their behalf. So how do we regain that trust? By agreeing that we will not use data or the output from climate models to inform public policy unless they have been developed according to established quality systems for mission critical software and have been audited accordingly by a genuinely disinterested third party. Because of the implications for the global economy and the well-being of literally billions of people over the next century, requiring that the models and the data used to feed the models be subject to at least the process control and auditing that we would require of a medical device seems the absolute least we should do.”

So here’s Faine’s explanation for his censorship of what’s clearly a huge story with serious ramifications:

We make decisions every day [based] on our own opinions about what we think are the main stories. And what we leave out is often as important as what we put in, and that was my judgement of this issue..

That was my assessment of whether this was actually of any significance or not, and I decided that it wasn’t and we wouldn’t spend time on it. It suits the conspiracy theorists beautifully... It was a small, even a tiny fragment of a sidebar of a secondary issue to the edge of the periphery of something people were talking about other than the main game. That’s how I saw it.

It suits the “conspiracy theorists beautifully”. In other words, it suits the sceptics - and that must not be allowed to happen.

If you were unaware of the facts and the results of previous inquiries, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the latest one in the UK is somehow or other producing startling revelations that clearly implicate the then British government in lying to justify the invasion of Iraq and the deposing of the mass murdering Saddam Hussein.

As John Rentoul from The Independent makes clear however, (and gee, it must be a lonely gig at the Indie to be the voice of reason!), nothing could be further from the truth.

Just last night on the news there was the breathless reporting about how one piece of intelligence received just before the invasion indicated that Saddam might not be able to deploy the weapons he was believed to have.

One report amongst many often contradictory ones about which value judgements had to be made that he may not possess a capability!

But to listen to the reporter carry on, you'd think that a previously hidden smoking gun had been uncovered.

Except of course the current inquiry is simply dealing with exactly the same material as the Butler Inquiry did back in 2004.

From deep within the “whitewash!” heartlands of The Independent, John Rentoul is providing a one man rebuttal service for the Iraq inquiry. For example:

David Grossman was terribly excited on Newsnight last night about all the “revelations” from yesterday’s session, but as he listed them each could be ticked off from the Butler report of 2004.

The story that best fitted the anti-war narrative was probably the “Mandarins reveal that 10 days before Iraq invasion PM knew Saddam couldn’t use WMDs”. Or, as the Daily Mail headlined it across a two-page spread: “Blair lied and lied again.” Or, in the real world: “Daily Mail lies and lies again.” (Not that the l-word is desirable.)

None of this is new, and none of it is clear-cut, as the Inquiry witnesses made clear. Some of the intelligence suggested Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons had been dismantled, some suggested that it had not. All of it suggested that Saddam had stocks of illegal weapons material which, if not immediately usable, could be rendered so.

For the record, Harry's Place is a Left-wing British blog, closely associated with the Labour Party.

And I reckon those who were disappointed that the Butler Inquiry failed to find any evidence of a conspiracy to go to war in Iraq, (I'd remind people that Saddam Hussein was put into the cross hairs by the Clinton Administration, not that of George Bush - it was Bill Clinton who signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law), are going to end up being similarly disappointed with the current one.

If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."

They never have. What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

Now they and their media shills -- who sneered that all who questioned their phony "consensus" were despicable "deniers," the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust -- are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.

So they desperately try to portray it as the routine "messy" business of science, lamely insisting, "nothing to see here folks, move along."

Before the Internet -- which has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of so-called "wise elites" -- they might have gotten away with it.

But not now, as knowledgeable climate bloggers are advancing the story and forcing the co-opted mainstream media to cover a scandal most would rather ignore.

The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.

From the YouTube description: Ed gets into a shoutfest and can’t stop pointing his finger at Stuart Varney of Fox News: “You’re spewing your nonsense again …” says Begley. We’re talking about Climategate..the recent discovery of e-mails by global warming ’scientists’ that suggest a cover up..thousands of e-mails and documents (verified by the New York Times) have been released showing scientists trying to cover up the recent decline in temperatures and ‘trick’ the public.

From Andrew Bolt. No, we're not going to do what some alarmists have quite literally done in relation to climate sceptics, that is, call for them to be placed on trial for crimes against humanity. (No, seriously, this is exactly what some radical and extreme environmentalists have called for in relation to those who dared to disagree with them.)

But questions will be asked in the context of debating how so many people throughout the scientific establishment, politics and the bureaucracy and the media were so comprehensively duped by a coalition of activists scientists and green carpetbaggers. About how many then sought to profit from fanning the hysteria.

There will be an especial accounting of the media, which totally failed to live up to its responsibility to be cautious and sceptical. Too always look for the story behind the spin. In regards to environmental matters in general and climate change in particular, its failure has been almost total.

It has been sad to watch the decline of SBS in this regard. It has recently decided to throw off even the pretence of balance and objectivity and is now activity campaigning for the alarmist cause.

Though it is humorous up to a point. Just when it is clear that some in the media, including even the BBC, have noted the change in wind direction and have started to trim their sails accordingly, the SBS decides to set its spinnaker.

The tide is turning. And fast. There will soon be an accounting - and the mood and the money for it. The reputation of science - and of many scientists - will be damaged severely.

Until now those scientists who knew the science behind global warming theory was weak or flawed largely kept their doubts to themselves, out of fear or other forms of self-interest. I’ve had the emails from some confessing to just that.

But self-interest should dictate they now make a stand. They need to show, for their own sake and for the sake of science, that they were on the right side of this debate, even if belatedly. Already I see some speaking - one even writing a book - who did not speak two years ago. There must be more now, to halt this madness before even more harm is done.

A decade from now, when scientists and the public look back at this extraordinary scandal, this great fit of collective madness, the question will be asked: on which side were you?

UPDATE. After reading Monbiot’s account of initial CRU reaction to this scandal ("like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike"), it’s difficult to disagree with Miranda Devine’s call: “Climate alarmists are in a mad fumbling panic.”

Momentum does seem to be growing, from people on both sides of the argument, behind calls for a full independent enquiry that can once and for all get to the bottom of the many issues that have been raised. A recent survey showed that climate scepticism in this country is growing, and this episode may increase it further.

Indeed it might. Hudson’s commenters are enjoying themselves; one of them mentions a bristlecone pine, which is always a positive sign.

UPDATE Reader Dorian asks if the same tinkering produced this graph for Australia. A good question, since the leaked documents from the University of East Anglia contain this confession about temperature records:

In the geological past, there have been six major ice ages. During five of these six ice ages, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was higher than at present. It is clear that the colorless, odorless, non-poisonous gas called carbon dioxide did not drive past climates. Carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant.

Humans have adapted to live on ice sheets, deserts, mountains, tropics, and sea level. History shows that humans and other organisms have thrived in warm times and suffered in cold times.

Vertebrate paleontologist Scott Sampson just started up his own blog, "The Whirlpool of Life." The launch, of course, coincides with the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. The blog is well-worth checking out - see it at:

I didn't, because it's tabloid rubbish I never watch, but I think I missed another gust of wind from the developing sea change that is coming in.

So as an exercise in grappling with the Zeitgeist, you should watch it too! (See below.)

A mainstream media report on climate change that begins in the usual fashion - file footage that would make you think that somehow that droughts, fires and floods were unusual in Australia and that it must all be due to the glooball warmening.

But then it goes absolutely weird.

It actually has three people casting doubt on man-made global warming, not so as to set them up for a contrived hatchet job like the ABC would, but rather just lets them say what they have to say.

One of the three is the world renowned botanist and environmentalist David Bellamy.

It’s that A Current Affair interviews three people about global warming and the emissions trading scheme, all of whom agree the public is being duped without the reporter or presenter suggesting these people are speaking anything other than plain sense.

The public sentiment is shifting fast. Where would it be now had the Liberals studied the science - and dared to oppose?

James Cook University’s Prof Peter Ridd said global warming could actually be good for the Reef. And he accused scientists of “pushing particular lines” in a bid to save their jobs and keep their funding flowing.

“There’s a lot of money at stake here,” Prof Ridd said....

“There’s large organisations in science who are pushing particular lines and ... the other side of the argument is not being heard.”

And add to that the admission this week of professional alarmist Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers:

When we come to the last few years when we haven’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate...We just don’t understand the way the whole system works… See, these people work with models, computer modelling. So when the computer modelling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem… Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.

What a Liberal party could have done with such material this week had it determined to oppose this hoax fix to a dubious scare that even Flannery admits isn’t panning out as predicted.

These guys aren’t really talking about reducing the risk for heart disease or early death; they’re discussing how to use extremely expensive medications that are not particularly benign to treat lab values. As I’ve written countless times, statins can quickly and effectively treat lab values, but there is little evidence they treat much else. So if you want to have lab values that are the envy of all your friends, statins are the way to go. But if you want to really reduce your risk for all-cause mortality, you might want to think twice before you sign up for a drug that will cost you (or your insurance company) $150-$250 per month, make your muscles ache, diminish your memory and cognition, and potentially croak your liver.

Apparently a 30% reduction in the number of people with high LDL-cholesterol in a study's subject groups produced effectively no change in the rate of coronary heart disease overall. Well, actually, a small but statistically insignificant increase.

KEVIN Rudd's Emissions Trading Scheme will increase the average family's bills by about $1100 a year.

Based on the Federal Government's own modelling, by 2012 the ETS will add more than 20 per cent to electricity tariffs - a surge of nearly $300 for typical households already reeling in New South Wales from a similar blow from the state pricing tribunal in July.

And industry forecasts predict grocery prices could surge 5 per cent once the estimated price of carbon is imposed, making stocking a home larder $520 more expensive, The Daily Telegraph reports.

If these were internal Exxon-Mobil e-mails, the trial lawyers would be racing out the door with only one pants-leg filled and every Green press flack would be demanding this lead the evening news and front every newspaper above the fold. If similar e-mails came from the RNC showing racism or homophobia, the New York Times would not demur in the name of privacy, it would call for the GOP to go into federal receivership.

Since there’s federal grant money involved, might there be False Claims Act suits? That’s not my area, but I’d be interested in hearing from someone who knows.

Tim Flannery on Lateline, June 10, 2005: The general patterns that we're seeing in the global circulation models - and these are very sophisticated computer tools, really, for looking at climate shift - are saying the same sort of thing that we're actually seeing on the ground. So when the models start confirming what you're observing on the ground, then there's some fairly strong basis for believing that we're understanding what's causing these weather shifts and these rainfall declines, and they do seem to be of a permanent nature.

Tim Flannery on Lateline on Monday:You see these people work with models, computer models, right? So when the computer modelling and the real world disagree, you've got a very interesting problem, and that's when science really gets engaged. We don't actually know why the current cooling is occurring because the current modelling doesn't reflect it. We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge - we don't.

True believer George Monbiot, May 10, 2005:It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb; a crumb which disintegrates in your palm.

If only I'd been more sceptical. George Monbiot in The Guardian on Monday:It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted from the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request. Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.

I shouldn't gloat I know, but it is interesting that Dr Flannery now confirms what I have said for years was patently self-evident and obvious, ie that our knowledge of how the planet's climate works is too partial and incomplete to be making definite pronouncements about how we may be affecting it, and certainly too partial and incomplete to be assuming we had any idea what will be happening by the end of this century and that this somehow provided the sensible justification to completely turn our economy and that of the rest of the world upside down and at the cost of quite literally trillions of dollars by the time of whole mad scheme was finished.

What he's saying of course is that rather than the science on climate change being settled as he and others have been falsely claiming for years, it is anything but.

And just to settle one point once and for all, Flannery (and very reluctantly, the Department of Climate Change) now both admit that there has been either no warming for a decade now, or indeed there has actually been a cooling trend.

But the whole demented caravan marches on and continues with its increasingly threadbare antics. So today we yet again have the polar ice card played.

Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “ClimateGate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material and that sought for years by CEI go to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

This is for British citizens and expats only. Since George Monbiot called for Dr. Jones to resign, and for the data to be reanalysed, perhaps some UK readers can persuade him to sign.

Here are the details: We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to suspend the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia from preparation of any Government Climate Statistics until the various allegations have been fully investigated by an independent body.

Deadline to sign up by: 24 February 2010 The details of the petition: The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is a “leading centre” for the investigation of “manmade global warming” and government policy relies on the integrity of these statistics. Several claims have been made: that data was “cherry picked” to make the 20th century temperature rise look exceptional in historical terms; emails suggest the unit has colluded in “tricks” to “hide the decline” in a high profile scientific journal, and this unit has colluded in active, secret and highly political campaigning through the website “realclimate”.

The preparation of climate statistics require many judgements: stations move & sites become surrounded by urban sprawl (urban heating) & a judgement must be made of the size of the offset to apply to the global temperature record. The University accepts most emails are genuine so it appears the Unit has been acting in a highly partisan way incompatible with that of a neutral body preparing and interpreting government data. We call on the PM to suspend all further use of the climate research unit until all pertinent allegations have been investigated and any action (if any) has been taken.